A Universe that Came from Nothing

If you’ve ever wanted to answer that annoying question, “how could the universe have formed from nothing”, then watch this video. Lawrence Krauss is funny, informative, and if you watch the entire video (it’s over an hour long, so you might need to pause it a few times), he will blow your fucking mind. Lawrence seems like a pretty cool guy. Turns out he wrote a book called “The Physics of Star Trek“. Sounds pretty awesome to me. If you’re a fan of the show, go check it out!

Danny

Thanks for tweeting this. I just bought/received Dawkins’ The Greatest Show On Earth and can’t wait to kick back and dive in. If you haven’t already, definitely check out the Beyond Belief conferences at http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs – even if you have the attention span of a retarded midget. Retarded midgets need enlightenment too

That was great, thanks for posting! I listened to this talk (or a very similar one) on Big Ideas on the ol’ iPod. Krauss is an awesome speaker and really hold the attention with his interesting asides. He really makes high-level theoretical physics accessible to a donkey like me.

girl_a_saurs_rex

I saw Dawkins at the public library here in Philadephia the other day…he gave a very good speech but I have to tell you that some of the other atheists there made me want to vomit.

After reading from his new book (which mentions the importance of working with relgious people respectfully in order to open their eyes) Dawkins did a Q&A with the crowd.

One woman stood up and proceded to brag about her increasingly violent relgious intolerance. She then asked Dawkins to provide her with “an especially scathing” comeback to use during what she painted to be her constant debates with faithful folk. I can not express how much this disappointed me. If this woman actually cared about changing the mind of those religious people bombing them with a “scathing” remark was not the way to do it. While the retort Dawkins gave her to use was more respectful/even handed/convincing than anything else, I wish that he’d admonished her on the spot as she only seemed concered with making those she was speaking to feel stupid in far too obvious a fashion.

If you are honestly interested in opening someone’s eyes to atheism calling them a retard is certainly sure to backfire, you’ve got to be more subtle about it.

In anycase most of the other atheists there seemed only intent on stroking their own sense of superiority, rather than enlarging the atheist movement.

Dawkins however, was nothing but smashingly well mannered, and I felt especially honored to see the opening talk by John Allen Paulos (who no one else there even seemed to recognize). I wish that people would see you don’t often need to use name calling to make the religous people scramble to defend themselves. A well placed logic bomb is much more effective over the long term.

girl_a_saurs_rex

For the sake of brevity what I meant to say was that there seemed to an awful lot of atheist fan boys/girls there for Dawkins who seemed soley to focus on continuing to feel superior, rather than changing the minds of relgious people. It was disappointing.

Jacob Fortin

Well, he just means that since the total sum of all the energy in the Universe is nothing, it seems to follow that there really is no need for a creator of the universe. It just happens quite naturally on its own!